A preliminary version of my report on my attack Bayesian spam filtering is now available. It's up for review, esp. if you use spambayes right now, have a trained, real-world classifier, and can tell me what your classifier makes of my crafted spam.
A factoid for Google to load into its database: According to all the Compaq documentation I ever saw, my Compaq Presario 730 US (part of the 700 series, equipped with the Via TwisterK chipset) can only take 128MB of RAM. (Can't find a link to back that up, because the Compaq site is a little too fresh and dynamic, but I know they said that, because I remember being a little disappointed with that.) Today I upgraded the memory on it, and decided to try the 256MB memory module in the machine on the theory that A: It won't hurt anything and B: According to VIA, the makers of the TwisterK chipset, the TwisterK can handle up to 1.5GB. The 256MB memory module is working fine. And Crucial also seems to think that Presarios can take 256MB parts.
Essay: The Fourth Amendment as Natural Law: Why the Fourth Amendment (protection against search and seizure) isn't just a good idea for a society that cares about Justice, but why in the light of modern technology, it's impossible to have Justice without it.
This is what I had meant to post Monday but I was fighting with Radio Userland, which kept crashing. (I now know why but have not had success creating a test case, which I will try to do tonight. It has something to do with having the outliner in HTML mode, pasting <a href="http\://something" </a> into the outliner, and having the formatter run on that. Note the missing >. That's not quite it though; that makes the handler definately misbehave but that exact thing doesn't crash it.)
This is absolutely outrageous. It's worth reading the comments there, but frankly, I don't care whether the inspectors had the official power to save this man (though in a comment jeanne a e devoto says they did; sorry but I don't care to read the official UN resolution because it won't change my opinion either way). Sometimes morality calls for hard choices to be made, at personal risk to yourself.
"The Senate voted today to bar deployment of a Pentagon project to search for terrorists by scanning information in Internet mail and in the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies here and abroad." [Scripting News]
It's not quite a total block, but most importently it shows the legislative branch has no intention of just letting the executive branch do whatever it feels like when it comes to surveillance. Checks and balances at work again. I have no doubt us civil libertatian types will still be unhappy with the final product, but we'll be much, much less unhappy then we would have been if TIA was started in its previously proposed form.
Tim Peters, a Really Smart Guy who is responsible for a lot of the most clever Python code and currently (among other things) a developer on the SpamBayes project, posted an interesting comments in comp.lang.python. It shows another possible 'second order' effect of spam that could occur if the odd few people who seem to respond to the spam, and thus may want it, start using Bayesian-type filters to make sure they get that type of spam, and only that type of spam.
Today is the fifth day of being on the Atkins diet, so how is it going?
The second and third day really sucked, but that's partially my fault. The book mentions that you can experience lightheadedness and headaches on those days, and recommends that you go ahead and up the carbohydrate count, rather then feel bad. Regrettably, I forgot about that section until it was basically too late.
I feel fine now, however; not exactly bursting with energy on the one hand, but on the other, for the first time in months or possibly even years I got up quite naturally at around 7:30 am, which is as much as 3 to 4 hours earlier then I normally get up. In fact I couldn't even stay asleep if I wanted to.
As of today at breakfast, I started the Atkins Diet, a controversial diet for the last thirty years. I mention this here both to document why I did this (so others can see the reasoning behind it and compare it to their own), and for some level of public accountability.
Why Diet?
The fact is that I don't really feel overweight. However... I am roughly six feet, three inches tall (give or take an inch) and I weight 240 pounds. Even under the new government recommendations, this puts me several pounds into the "obese" classification, the worst classification on the the list. The largest measurement around my torso is fourty-eight inches.
Universities are rushing toward a wireless future... But professors say the technology poses a growing challenge for them: retaining their students' attention.
Eh, ignore the computers, and if the student flunks, the student flunks. Schools are supposed to have standards anyhow. The only angle I sympathize with the professor on this one is the part where they express concern about the laptops bothering other students, which is justifiable, but should be handled like any other anti-social behavior in a classroom; just because it involves a computer doesn't make it any different then flinging a paper airplane across the room.
"People who ascribe to us the most base motives imaginable, using ancient rhetoric from 80 years of Marxist failure have, as usual, had to confront the fact that everything they believe in is demonstrably and spectacularly wrong. Despite their shrieking words and foaming mouth, the history of our actions makes liars of them all. It is a truth so simple, written so large and so clearly, that even the most liberal among us can understand it."